David Szetela, writing in Search Engine Watch, offers some excellent tips for interpreting pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign data.

He explains that the most crucial data points are the conversion rate and cost-per-conversion, and that if the underlying aim of the campaign is to generate profitable sales, then these are much more important than such metrics as the click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC).

Yet, he makes a useful distinction. The CTR is still a useful indicator of how keywords and ads combine to generate a click, while the conversion rate measures how well keywords, ads, and the landing page combine to get a visitor to take the desired action (e.g. clicking on a link, opting in to a list, buying a product). The cost-per-conversion, meanwhile, measures the price paid to get someone to both click on the ad and take the desired action.

David explains that the results generated by a campaign can not only indicate the performance of the campaign, but can also highlight how well or poorly the campaign has been structured. For example, if the CTR and conversion rates vary widely within an ad group, the keywords in the ad group are not as related to one another, to the ad copy, or to the landing page (in the case of significant conversion rate variance), as is ideal. That indicates the keyword group should be split up into tighter groups.

Another tip is that when a particular keyword has a relatively high search volume and a lot of conversions at the right cost-per-conversion but a relatively low CTR… then it’s probably a good idea to carve off that keyword into a separate ad group - maybe even its own ad group - so that a more focused ad can be written.

On the other hand, if a keyword has a high CTR but low conversion rate, this may signify the need to better align the landing page with the PPC ad copy.

David Szetela makes an interesting point about keywords with low CTRs (e.g. less than 0.5%) and low (but not zero) conversion rates. While it may be tempting to scrap such keywords, he suggests that any keyword that produces a conversion is worth keeping. In this case it may be a matter of tweaking the ‘match’ settings and/or add some qualifiers to the keyword list (e.g. negative keywords) to improve its performance.

Check out the article for more tips for analyzing your PPC data.

Source: David Szetela, “Reading the Tea Leaves: Interpreting Keyword Reports”, Search Engine Watch, October 13, 2008

Yesterday, I hinted at some stunning results uncovered by Enquiro and MarketingSherpa about what searchers see when they use search engines.

Well, here it is…

According to the research, almost no searchers look at the right side of the page!

So… if you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google or Yahoo, for example, almost no-one will see your ad when they search because, except for the first three PPC ads, all the ads are displayed on the right side of the page.

Now, there is a slight difference if the searchers are specifically looking for something to buy. In this case, a few more of them will look at the top-right ads. The vast majority, however, will still focus on the listings on the left.

Does that mean you should abandon your PPC efforts? NO!

A well crafted PPC campaign is a powerful and cost-effective way to generate qualified traffic to your website.

Remember, you only pay per click. Sure, only a small minority of searchers may see your ad. But if you still generate profitable sales by getting enough of them to click through and buy from you, then there’s no question that you should continue your PPC campaign.

HOWEVER, what the research does mean is that you must invest in search engine optimization to get your listing seen by the majority of searchers.

Otherwise, you are ignoring - or should I say, being ignored by - the vast majority of searchers… and leaving money on the table.

Now, there’s one more result from the research that impacts on your SEO and PPC efforts. I’ll share it with you in Monday’s issue of Kikabink News.

Source: Anne Holland, “Search Engine Marketing: Top Five Eye-Tracking Laboratory Test Results”, MarketingSherpa, January 4, 2006